Tokko Vols. 1-2 (Tohru Fujisawa, Afternoon)
I’m trying to pinpoint the moment when I realized this series was trash. My trash alarm definitely started up during the first “action” scene, though I should really refer to it as a gore scene because that’s all it consisted of. That probably did it, though a later scene where an attractive police woman hits on the protagonist out of the blue really hit the nail in the coffin. I guess I was wrong to expect anything from this series. It’s really an excuse to watch hot women cut up monsters in the most bloody ways imaginable.
However, I thought it might serve as an interesting comparison to other entries in the genre such as Devilman and Parasyte, but there’s just too much nothingness here to even do that, except for two points. This series is only interested in using the monsters as dissection fodder. They killed the protagonist’s parents when he was a child and now we should accept that they all must die. In Parasyte despite that the protagonist’s mother is killed by a parasite, there’s still some hope that humans and parasites can learn to co-exist. In Tokko there’s a big deal made about how the public can’t be told about the monsters. In Parasyte the government decides the same thing, yet the public manages to learn about the parasites and how to detect them despite the secrecy efforts.
Jyu-Oh-Sei Vol. 1 (Natsumi Itsuki, LaLa/Melody)
There’s nothing fancy about the premise here. Two twins, Thor and Rai, from a high class space colony are transported to a planet, Kimaera, with extremely dangerous weather, plant life, and inhabitants that is secretly being used by the colony leaders as a prison.
This isn’t a survival series despite what the premise suggests. There’s more focus on character interaction and world building, with the occasional action scene thrown in to the mix. Kimaera’s inhabitants are divided into separate communities based on race and gender. Each community as three ranked leaders, a First, Second, and Third.
While it’s easy for the reader to scoff at the primitive division, it’s important to note how the females come across as strong and capable of thriving in their independence. When Thor and his female companion/savior Tiz decide to free themselves of these guidelines and start their own community, Thor is marked as the First and Tiz is merely the Second. This makes it clear that there attempts at reform are misguided, however well intended they were. Inevitably Thor will have to compete to become the next Beast King (world leader) if he wants to escape.
I thought this book was fairly dark for a shojo series. There’s a lot of emphasis on how only the strong survive and this cruel fact is definitely rubbed in the reader’s face. Though on the bright side, the cold attitude that being the strongest is everything saves Thor from prosecution after he kills out of self-defense.
There are some things about this volume that bothered me. There has yet to be any real pay off from having the twins come from the richest colony in the galaxy. There’s an almost obligatory scene where Thor realizes how spoiled and even isolated he was back home and I’ll admit this scene was handled very nicely but it didn’t need Thor to have had such a lavish upbringing to work. Maybe it merely helps justify the way he dismissed everyone on the planet as beasts without much thought.
I disliked one scene where two supporting characters embrace after admitting their love for each another. The scene ends with a close up of the male, revealing that he is thinking about something else, probably something not nice. I expect sentimental reuniting moments to be undermined but this wasn’t a good way to go about it because it’s too obvious and undeniable that it’s a mistake for the female character to give into her emotions.
